They Just Aren’t Your People

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I had just had an amazing forty-eight hours in Christchurch and I was leaving New Zealand’s third largest city inspired and well-fed behind the work of small counter chefs, quaint kitchens and a TranzAlpine foodie train ride across the South Island.  The sun was shining and I was leaving satisfied I had maximized my time in this charming city and country.

I slid into my airport Uber and it wasn’t long before the young driver and I were engaged in a friendly back and forth, exchanging pleasantries at first and then the conversation gradually turned to real and heavier things.  I had opened the door, I suppose, by sharing that I was traveling exclusively for work these days thanks to a forced career reset and layoff. 

My driver got very quiet and I wondered as I do, if I had sounded too much like a privileged, out-of-touch, middle-aged white American.  He eventually broke the silence, confessing that just three days before, he had been forced to move back in with his parents in Christchurch after losing his job quite unexpectedly in Wellington.

He was friendly, if not outright friends with the man who ran the company and recruited him.  Just the night before, this manager had invited him to a party and promised him there was nothing to stress over.  My driver went to bed that night feeling heard and satisfied but woke up the next morning to learn by email he’d been fired.

To hear him tell his story when it was still so raw was heartbreaking.

His role had been to come in and shake things up.  But the more he tried to modernize the way his company did things the more he found himself on the wrong side of office politics.  He hadn’t been there that long and he’d already been shunned and deemed powerless and expendable by his peers.

“No matter what I tried to do, they ganged up on me.” He saw me recoil and wince.

His voice grew louder, shakier and more impassioned as he spoke about failed attempts at diplomacy, creative problem solving and building relationships.  He wasn’t angry.  He was just rightfully emotional.  He seemed equal parts hurt, bitter, disillusioned and confused.  Emotions I understood in painstaking detail.

The more he talked the more I panicked.  I closed my eyes and begged the universe for the right words to come, the ones this young man needed to hear today or could at least hold on to for later.  I really tried.  Words came out – half-formed anecdotes, a few misshapen platitudes.  Finally my voice trailed off in defeat. “They just aren’t your people,” I said in a soft whisper.

He had heard me. Our eyes locked in the rearview mirror.

Those were words a friend had said to me when I was hurting the most.  They had given me permission to see I was in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing and so yes, of course, I was surrounded then by people who weren’t my people anymore.

Finding my voice again, I spoke up to reassure him. “You’ll find your people. And when you do, you’ll find yourself.”

As I walked into the airport, I couldn’t help but regret not telling him.

We had already found each other.